HP Cloud Strategy Leaked On LinkedIn

HP’s CEO Leo Apotheker recently announced that cloud computing is one of HP’s key initiatives and the company is aiming to be a public cloud giant. Yesterday, one HP exec showed the company’s cloud hand in a LinkedIn update that gave details of where HP’s taking its public cloud play. The Register reported last night that Scott McClellan, chief technologist and interim vice president of engineering for HP’s new cloud services business, posted the plans on his LinkedIn page but they have subsequently been pulled. McClellan described plans for computing, networking and storage services, as well as shared management services that span the core infrastructure services. McClellan is responsible for driving the technical strategy, architecture and business direction as a co-founder for HP Cloud Services.

According to McClellan’s update, HP plans to launch an “object storage” service that the company built from scratch, which is likely a data storage offering similar to Amazon Web Services’ Simple Storage Service (S3). HP plans for a “compute,” “networking,” and “block storage” service that McClellan wrote is an “innovative and highly differentiated approach to ‘cloud computing’ – a declarative/model-based approach where users provide a specification and the system automates deployment and management; and common/shared services that offer user management, key management, identity management and federation, authentication, authorization, auditing, billing and metering and more.

Additionally, McClellan wrote on his LinkedIn page, that HP is creating a Web site and developer suite that will offer APIs and language bindings for Java, Ruby and other open source languages and a fully functional GUI and CLI. HP is also cooking up quality assurance, code and design inspection processes and security and penetration testing as part of its cloud strategy, McClellan wrote.

HP could not be reached for comment as of press time, however we are not certain if this information wasn’t leaked intentionally to create more buzz in the industry. If it was the intention it certainly worked.